Three new stills and one behind the scenes image to promote Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus have appeared on DVD Forum. You’ll be able to marvel over them all below the break.

Parnassus is being described in the same few terms over and over again. It was Heath Ledger‘s final film, and after his death, Terry Gilliam turned to Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to complete the picture by stepping in and filling in for Ledger, playing his character in a series of fantasy sequences. You’ve probably also heard some scaremongering that the film is going to bypass US cinemas but, truthfully, there’s nothing to that rumor at all. Indeed, a buyers screening this week seemed to spark a whole new wave of interest amongst American distributors even ahead of the film’s Cannes premiere. According to Entertainment Weekly, some of these buyers criticized the film’s storyline as being “rather complex” but that reflects on the buyers more than the film.

In this first picture you’ll see Heath Ledger as Tony. He’s neither the protagonist nor the antagonist of the film but rather the spoils of their conflict. Tony is the story that happens to Dr. Parnassus and not the other way around, as it were.

And here is Lily Cole as Valentina, daughter of the titular doctor and key player in his magical, mysterious troop of traveling showfolk. She becomes, as you might expect, a love interest for Heath Ledger’s Tony.

Below, this is the good Doctor himself. The script describes this make-up and comfy looking attire as that of an “Indian holy man” and this is how we see him in the opening scenes when he takes his Imaginarium to the streets of London.

And here is the behind the scenes image with director Terry Gilliam appearing alongside Plummer.

There’s no film I more keenly anticipate than this, and even after having read two drafts of the script, sniffed around every corner of the internet in search of every last scrap of pertinent info, and looped the promo reel* until I could recite it, these images still charge me with a passionate excitement.

*that promo reel actually contained fleeting and low-res glimpses at three of these images, but these reproductions are much better.